Message From the Director

The changing of seasons and coming of spring and summer brings many changes, events, and challenges. These difficult economic times bring many challenges to a nonprofit organization as it does for businesses and individuals. Many people are struggling right now with difficult times, interpersonal dynamics, financial and employment struggles, and for many this brings on mental health problems, both for those with mental illness and those facing the psycho-social dynamics resulting from those struggles. Suicide is not the result of one problem but is a result of a culmination of factors in a person’s life. As we see more people struggle and start to feel more and more hopeless, that is when we as a community need to pull together to help people who are struggling. The timing seems fitting as the community of Rapid City and the surrounding area was chosen by the South Dakota Division of Mental Health as a project site for a South Dakota Community Partnership for Suicide Prevention grant project. I will be leading the community’s suicide prevention taskforce. If you have an interest in serving on this taskforce and work with people at-risk of suicide, please call me to learn more about the project. The Front Porch Coalition continues to be the most organized nonprofit organization in South Dakota that leads the efforts in suicide prevention.

A key component to suicide prevention is postvention support to people who have lost someone to suicide. Our L.O.S.S. Team continues to provide immediate support to people who have lost someone to suicide in Pennington County. As we continue to help more and more people, now more than ever we need volunteers to serve on our first response team, so please call if you would like to help us help people who have endured a tragic loss to suicide. I want to especially thank not only our volunteers for making this program so helpful to suicide survivors but also the Pennington County Sheriff’s Officers for their support of our L.O.S.S. Team and for helping us bring this service to survivors minutes after they have lost their loved one to suicide. They and our volunteer team members are the reason why we remain one of only approximately twelve active L.O.S.S. Team Programs in this country and one of twenty worldwide.

Also please join us at our 8th Annual Suicide Awareness Walk on Saturday, May 1st at 8:00 am at the Old Storybook Island Shelter. Anyone can come and walk, either in remembrance of someone they lost, to raise awareness, to meet people with this common interest, and/or to help us raise money, all of which is vital to this organization’s current efforts to expand its services. While times are difficult and many people are struggling, know that our work continues as we are working to improve the lives of everyone in our community while trying to instill hope to those that are struggling. We are here for anyone who has lost someone to suicide. Please reach out to us for help and support and/or to be a support to someone else who has endured a loss to suicide.

On the Survivor Services section of our website, you will have the opportunity to read the personal story of a mother who was reached by our L.O.S.S. Team the day her son died, a woman who became active in our suicide prevention efforts only months after loosing her son.  Her story is proof of what we know about the L.O.S.S. Team Program, the most effective means of intervention and support for someone who has experienced the traumatic loss of someone to suicide.  Please consider calling us if you have lost someone close to you to suicide.  If your loved one’s death did not happen in Pennington County within the past four years that our L.O.S.S. Team has been responding to the scene of suicides, we would not have been able to reach you immediately after the death occurred.  If you have not had the help and support that the L.O.S.S. Team provides to people who have lost someone to suicide, please call us. 

Sincerely,

Stephanie Schweitzer Dixon

Community Services Director